1955 detective fiction; sixth and last of Brand's novels of Inspector
Cockrill. On a Conducted Tour (an early package holiday) in Italy, one
of the group is murdered. Nobody has a strong motive, and everyone
seems to have an alibi. But the local Grand Duke is determined to
execute someone…

This is a book that suffers badly from what has come since. In
1955 a package tour somewhere sunny might have seemed exotic and
exciting; by the 1980s they were bad jokes. Brand successfully worked
out most of what the jokes would be, and uses them here, but to a
modern reader they come off as worn and tired sniping at an easy
target, in a way that the rest of the period setting doesn't. Why did
Cockrill (our supposed hero, let's bear in mind) come on the tour at
all, if he's so determined to hate everything about it and complain
about not getting the food and drink he'd have at home? This is never
explained. The locals are comic stereotypes.

The charming Puerto de Barrequitas, Port of the Little Boats, sends
forth its fishing fleet night after moonless night and in the grey
dawn welcomes it back with its contraband cargo; all hands,
including such members of the international anti-smuggling police as
have not been out to sea with it, turning to, to help with the
unloading. But even so it has proved, since the war, impossible to
feed the insatiable maw of the contraband-hungry tourist trade,
without recourse to the mainland, and San Juan reluctantly smuggles
in, instead of through, the Swiss watches, American nylons, French
liqueurs and Scotch whisky especially manufactured in Madrid,
Naples, and Cairo for this purpose. These are exhibited in the local
shops with 'Smuggled' in large letters printed on cards in various
languages [...]

As usual with Brand one doesn't expect any sympathetic characters, and
my word one doesn't get them. There's the successful and shallow
female novelist, the stock homosexual fashion designer (returning from
Death in High Heels though little is made of this), the
unhappily-married couple, the local tour guide, and the two
nearly-invisible quiet women.

She dropped her own eyes before his casual glance: a secret creature
with a closed secret face — with leaf-brown hair kept secret under a
tight-fitting hat, with a good figure kept secret in a repression of
corset and brassière, with clothes whose excellence was so discreet
that none but Mr Cecil would trouble to look at them twice: with far
more good looks than ever the flamboyant Louli Barker could boast,
kept secret beneath an apparently almost deliberate under-emphasis —
devoid of make-up, tight lipped, unsmiling, chill.

One of them will be murdered; one of them will be blamed; nobody will
end up happy. Brand seems to hate them too, as well as all the other
package-tourists, dwelling on their accents and silly ideas.

'Oh, do you say sangwidged too?' said Louli, delighted. Mr Cecil,
who knew no other way of saying it, was mystified but let it go.

one of the more obscure Jollies had been assaulted by one of the
sailors in a Nasty Way and the rest of the women were treating her
as Untouchable and wishing like anything that it had happened to
themselves.

The actual mechanics of the murder I found frankly implausible
bordering on impossible, though many puzzle-fans were satisfied. Some
evidence is relied on heavily, then undermined, where I as a reader
was simply regarding it as flimsy from the start; other evidence is
mentioned and then apparently forgotten, but turns out to be
important. I suppose this is all within the bounds of fair play, but
it feels like gamesmanship more than the genuine mistakes that these
people would make. The only real period detail is currency
restrictions, and the casual disregard for those regulations which
everyone here shows (even Cockrill).

I suppose it's all right, but the characters were wearing and there
wasn't much to engage me here.